Computing in freedom with GNU Emacs

Hello everyone, my name is Prailios also known as pro. This presentation is a modified version of the talk I gave last night at the floss at Oxford event. It was an event organized by people at the University of Oxford. I thank them for giving me the opportunity to participate in their program. I want to have this modified version here for people who do not read my website and thus are not aware of the event that took place last night. Having the video here on this uh video hosting platform means that everyone can benefit from it whether they follow my website or not. So let's get started. This is a holistic introduction to Emacs. I will talk to you about GNU Emacs or simply Emacs. This is a program you run on your computer. I am using it right now for this presentation. Emacs is free or Libra software. It allows you to read all of its source code to modify it and to share it and your customizations together. Thus, you contribute to and benefit from a community of welcoming users. I will tell you what all this means in practice and how you can improve your computing experience by switching to Emacs. Emacs as a capable text editor. When you first start using Emacs, it feels like a regular text editor program. You move the cursor around and edit text. Nothing obviously impressive out of the box. As a text editor, Emacs is highly capable. It has all sorts of keyboard shortcuts that let you efficiently operate on text. You can control Emacs without relying on the mouse if you want. It also has support for Uniode, the Uniode standard, which means that it is inclusive to peoples of different cultural backgrounds. The world's scripts can be expressed in Emacs. I am a native Greek speaker. I can use functionality that is built into Emacs to switch to the Greek alphabet in order to write something such as to say kalispera which means good evening. I can even spell da de jing in Chinese which is the title of a book from ancient China. Plus, we have emoji and I have some emoji characters on my screen here. With Emacs, you can include several fonts, several scripts on the same page. And uh this is an advantage for multilingual people like myself or those who do research that involves many natural languages. Emacs can combine several fonts on the same page as well as different colors. Each font has its own attributes such as for its relative size and typographic intensity. Same idea for colors. You can combine them in different ways. On my screen right now, I am already combining two different font styles. that of the heading which you see at the top of the screen and then that of the body of the text which is uh the remainder of the text over here. Emacs can display graphics alongside text. It does not limit you to a texton interface. It can display images and PDF documents. Below I have a link to an image file. I will now type a keyboard shortcut to reveal this image and I will do it again to hide it. So now typing the keyboard shortcut and you can see this image. It is a spot from a an area here in my mountains, the mountains of Cyprus just showing uh some pine trees and some shrubs and some uh bushes. That's all. And I will now uh toggle off the preview of this image and continue to the next slide. Emacs is an extensible text editor. Although you can benefit from it as a generic text editor, what really appeals to people like myself is the option to extend Emacs. Extend here means to introduce new functionality. functionality that is not available in the default program you install on the computer. These extensions are written in the same programming language as most of Emacs. It is a programming language called Emacs Lisp or ELISP. You can extend Emacs on your own by writing some program in ELIS or you can download an existing extension that the community has made available. Extending Emacs creates a community. For example, when I write a new extension for Emacs, I publish it under the terms of a free software license. These are the same terms that Emacs itself uses. Others can then download my extension and use it as they prefer. If they want, they can make their own modifications on top which may introduce other extensions that I had not thought of in my original implementation. And if those users follow my example, then I can also benefit from their additions once they publish them. As such, there exists a community of enthusiastic users of Emacs who care about sharing their works with the rest of the world. The extensibility of Emacs happens live. Users can extend Emacs by running some Emacs list program. Such a program can be as short as a single line or it can be as long as it needs to be. It does not matter. Users run the program and Emacs immediately does what the program renders possible. For example, I am doing this presentation inside of Emacs. But Emacs does not have a presentation mode built into it. I thus developed my own extension which empowers me to do what I am doing right now. Let me toggle off my presentation mode to show you what I mean. And I will type the key binding for that and continue to the next slide. Notice my view without the presentation mode. The headings are smaller than they were before. They are the same size as the rest of the text. There is no number next to the heading. Now, if you notice, then there is a bar at the bottom of my screen with information about what I am working on. On the side, there are line numbers indicating where my cursor is in this file. Plus, my current line is highlighted with a distinct background color. Let me shift it up and down to illustrate this point. You can see that I am moving between the lines and the highlight follows me along. All those elements of the interface are useful while I am programming. But they look distracting when I wish to focus on some portion of text. So I just type the keyboard shortcut I have which I will do right now. And voila, I get the style I prefer. Emacs puts you in control of your computing. You may wonder, why do I even need a customizable text editor? The answer is about control. You are in charge of what you use and how you use it. You can piece together a workflow that works the way you prefer. This presentation mode I toggled on and off just now behaves exactly how I want. I decided which set of interface tweaks to apply. Another user may have a different preference in this regard. For instance, they may like having line numbers on the side of the screen. There is no right or wrong answer in this regard. What matters is that Emacs gives us the means to do what makes sense to us. Your control extends to all workflows. So apply this principle that I just described to everything you can use Emacs for. This will generally be some text centric endeavor. I personally run my agenda exclusively through Emacs. I handle all my email correspondence with Emacs. I do programming and I write pros such as blog posts for my website and books or technical manuals. For each of these, I know that Emacs will empower me to perform my tasks without arbitrary restrictions. Emacs lets me use Elisp to modify how I do my emails, for instance, and how I present tasks in my custom agenda view for an integrated computing environment. Without Emacs, I would not be in a position to control my computing experience to the extent I do. The reason is that I would be relying on many different applications. Each application has its own interface and design paradigms. Each application is configured, if at all, in a way that is specific to it. Customizations in one application do not carry over to other applications. And if we consider the important implementation details, each application may be configurable in its own programming language. In other words, that is not an integrated computing experience. Many apps do not combine nicely. To have the same degree of control that Emacs makes possible, I would have to hope that somehow all those disparate applications would conspire in my favor. That is wishful thinking. The reality is that piecing together many different applications is an exercise in frustration and the path to a life of ever distracting context switching. Emacs makes your workflow consistent. Having everything you need inside of Emacs ensures that things happen in a manner that is consistent. All customizations are written in the same programming language, namely Emacs list. What you define for one context such as this presentation mode can be used in another context. For example, I can have this presentation style enabled when I read emails. Why? Because it can make it more comfortable for me at a certain hour of the day. And I can even automate this with conditional logic. So it happens on its own when I open a new email under certain conditions. Integrated computing in practice. When you work with many applications that do not play nicely together, you cannot do something that the developers have not envisaged. For example, your email client likely does not have access to a presentation mode. Same for your other applications. Similarly, your many applications will not necessarily know how to read and interpret the configurations you have in one application. Suppose you define your favorite color scheme for your email client. You take the time to consider the harmonies and use precise typography to your liking. Now you switch to your calendar application and none of that work carries over. You have to do it all over again assuming it is even possible. Emacs makes integration easier. Colors and styles may seem like relatively small issues, but they are indicative of something greater. Desperate applications do not work together seamlessly. Emacs does not have this problem. You define something for one context you have in mind and eventually it can be used in another context that initially you had not even thought of. For example, in my emacs I wrote a small function to quickly copy the thing at where the cursor is. This is useful when I do programming as this thing can be an entire expression like the definition of a function. But this thing may also be a link that I got in my email. I had not thought of that use case in advance. Yet it was trivial to have my function do what I need in this uh case that was once unforeseen. Integration gives you emergent properties. The integrated computing environment of Emacs is more than the sum of its parts. This is because you can combine different pieces of functionality in ways that the original developer had not foresaw. You do not simply have your writing, your email, your agenda, etc. In Emacs, there is more. You have the functionality of one in tandem with the functionality of another. and you draw linkages between them as you see fit. Consider once again this presentation I am now doing. What I have in front of me is the transcript of my talk. This is a plain text document which I can edit live. Let me capitalize this to illustrate the point. And I will go to the word capitalize here and just capitalize just like that. This is an editable document. This is uh plain text. I have made it look like a series of slides, but it's actually not a slideshow. This is not an uh immutable document. Notice now that if I scroll up and down, which I will do in a second, you only get the section I am reading from. You do not have access to the rest of the document. I will just scroll down. That's all you get. I will scroll up. It is telling me I am at the beginning. There is no up. This is the beginning. This feature is known as narrowing. Let me widen the view and I will do that with a key binding and try to scroll again. You will be exposed to the rest of the text. I will scroll down and we see the next sections and I will scroll uh back up and we see the previous sections. Just like that. So I will come back to section 18 and narrow to this and you see how that is. This again now behaves like a slideshow even though it is nothing of the sort. It is just a wall of text. It is a plain text document. The original developer of this narrowing facility did not know how someone like me would make use of it. I have it here for my presentation. Each heading is its own sudo slide. I have narrowing for my emails when I want to read a portion of the text in a more focused way. It is all about how I choose to do my computing. Consistency facilitates productivity. For many years before switching to Emacs, I did not enjoy using the computer. I needed too much time to accomplish every single task. I could never find any of my files in a timely fashion. The reason is that there was no program that would enforce on my behalf a predictable file naming scheme. All my notes were were eventually not retrievable. This made them useless. Data you save is only good if you can find what you are searching for. Otherwise, it's just there. It's not contributing to anything. My music collection was inconsistent because I needed special software to write the metadata. In short, I was not as productive as I would like to be. And above all, it was not fun. Consistency removes the cognitive burden. And of course, there are some typos because I wrote this in one go. Most of my work at the time was centered around the email client and a word processor. The email client had its own subsystem for handling reminders for tasks. The format of those tasks was not interoperable with other programs. I could not access the tasks with my favorite text editor. I thus had to use the clanky interface of the email client which was never designed for task management and it was not configurable. And then I had all the cognitively burdensome annoyances of my two applications looking quite different from each other. My email did not behave like my documents which made it harder for me to flip between the two and continue writing. I would roll my eyes each time. The consistency of Emacs in action. Emacs has elevated my experience. I have been much more productive ever since I switched to it. Allow me to demonstrate a tiny bit of what I do each day. I will temporarily exit the presentation mode in this window. Then in the bottom half of my screen, I will open my email client to read a message I got. Uh once you follow my switch to the email client, I will hide the window that shows this presentation. After that, I will switch to my agenda to record a task and review what I have to do. All this is done inside of Emacs. So time for action. I am disabling uh the presentation mode. And now I will open my email client at the bottom half of the screen. Uh here in this uh view I have a presentation that I have configured to my liking and it has some filters that I have defined. I will just uh use a key. Of course I could do it with a mouse but I will use a key to select one of those uh sections and I will do unread packages. Uh the messages here are actually public. they are available from my GitHub repositories. So they are all public. Uh there is this message over here. I am reading it. Let's pretend this is something private and I have to act on it. Um actually this I will have to act on but now I'm not reading it right now. So um let me dismiss the presentation view. It's my email over here. I can check what is happening. And I'm like okay great. I have seen this. Let me create a task out of this. So I will bring up the interface I have uh where I have defined templates where I can write tasks quickly and I will select one of those templates using a key binding and now it has already prepopulated uh some text on my screen here and it is prompting me for the description of this task and I want to say uh check uh these ideas for the note silo. Denote silo is the name of the package that I have here uh for which there is this um issue and I tagged it and now I have this task created over here. Suppose that I want to um also schedule when this um sorry when this task should be done. So I will just pick a date here. Let's say it's for today. I want to do it later today when I will have some time. I will now store this uh information here. And uh there I have it. This is my template. I have written uh the task description. I have the schedule date. All this other data which I didn't write manually. It was just uh created automatically based on Emacs list that I wrote. And below there is a link to the email I was reading. So I can go back and see what all this was about. Let me file this in. And now I will switch to my agenda. This is a custom agenda view. Uh what you are seeing here is not my real agenda. I modified it a little bit for the purposes of this demo. I included these emoji here so that it's easier for you to make sense of the structure. And I wrote some dummy uh content over here uh for you to see. This agenda makes sense to me. It doesn't matter if it works for somebody else. It works for me. And that's all that is relevant. And here I get to see what I have to do for the day. What I should have done by forgot to do granted I have actually done this. Um and then I see okay what do I have uh for the day? What do I have later? It's this task that I just wrote. And what do I have this evening right and then what do I have in the coming days and then deadlines after that. From this agenda, I can open the task in question and I can modify it here if I need to. Right? So this is again plain text. There is uh nothing else here. You see I can just edit it like this. And once I am done of course I can go back uh to my uh work uh over here and find the presentation uh that I was doing. So this was the idea. Let me now switch back to the presentation mode and move to the next slide. Use Emacs Lisp to configure everything. What I just demonstrated is a very small part of what I do every single day. There is much more though I cannot cover it all in this presentation. The point however is the consistency of the experience. consistency throughout. I have customized my email client by writing some Emacs list code for it. I have done the same for the custom agenda I have and much more. You already noticed a little bit of this like there were consistent colors, consistent fonts. I was using the same key bindings that I have defined for everything. And even though you didn't actually uh notice that because I didn't bring it to your attention, the commands for editing text are the same. The way I capitalize text, for example, in one uh place is the same with how I do it for my email. There is no distinction there. It's these emergent properties I was telling you about. Every time I work with Emacs list, I acquire skills that are applicable outside the confines of the problem I am solving. For example, by configuring email the way I want, I pick up programming skills that I can then apply to the design of my custom agenda and then to everything else. Learning Emacs Lisp improves the experience. This is an investment that pays off more and more. Emacs will adapt to match my evolving needs. Each new workflow I incorporate in my Emac setup will thus benefit from all the knowledge and features I have accumulated. I do not have to relearn everything because I am now switching to another application. I do not have to throw away all the work I did all those years. It is here to stay. I do not feel the pressure to try the new shiny app of the day. I did that many times in the past and always regretted it. I lost my data and time in the process. Because I am rooted in this stability of Emacs, I remain productive and efficient. Emacs embodies software freedom. I mentioned earlier that Emacs is free or Libra software. This means that you can read its source code, modify it and share your changes with others. Emacs has a license that give users power. There is no corporation that could take Emacs away from us. It belongs to the community and we all tend to its wellness. In the case of Emacs, software freedom is not just about the license. It informs how you use the program. Emacs makes such freedom an irreducible part of its functionality. You can at any moment ask Emacs, what does a keyboard shortcut actually do? What is the definition of a function? What is the value of a variable and you may even access the source code to check for yourself. I will demonstrate this right now. I will type a key binding here. And now Emacs will tell me okay you want me to describe a key. Which key do you want? So I have to type a key. I will just use the key that I have been using here to toggle the presentation mode on and off. But it could be any key. So I type that and let's focus on this for a second. It's a help buffer here. It is uh telling me what this is about. What is the name of the command? Where is this command defined? Where it is bound to. And then it is um information that the developer has written. In this case of course that's the developer is me and what all this is about. We don't have to read it. Now I will now follow this link over here which takes me to the source code. So I can start learning. Okay, if I want to develop a mode, what does that mean? How do you write a mode? And I can already start seeing a little bit of how this uh is done. And then if I am curious, I can go further and be like, okay, I see here that there is some conditional logic. There is a setup here. What does this setup do? And I can see what that does. And okay, what is this? What does this do? And I can uh find it and check what this does. And so on. And little by little, I can start learning how things are done. And also inspect what the code is doing. So it's not doing anything strange. Let me go back uh to my presentation over here. The freedom of emacs helps with learning. I actually learned to program in Emacs list by exercising this freedom. What you just saw is actually how I learned. I would tinker with Emacs and continuously check on its state. What does this do? Which function is called by that keyboard shortcut? How is a program able to determine if the file is not saved? These sorts of questions. I wanted to learn how, for example, we move down a line. From there, I learned that we can move down many lines at once. I then figured that we can move down many lines at once and then also do something else, such as to place the cursor at the end of the line and then create a pulse effect to bring attention to it. a pulse effect like this one that I am now showing which is by the way another package of mine pulsar. Not only did I learn how to configure Emacs, I even wrote tens of extensions for it. I have also authored a libra book titled Emacs lisp elements. This freedom is not theoretical. I did not have a background in programming yet I was empowered to act and to grow as a person. Emacs is not only for programmers. Emacs is extended with Emacs list. If you know how to program in that language, you can be extra opinionated and particular about the way Emacs facilitates your work. But even without any expertise of this sort, you can still do much of what you like. Remember that I started using Emacs without having a background in programming. Emacs blurs the distinction between user and developer. Many of the developers actually start out as users like myself. They learn along the way and eventually they contribute to the development of Emacs. I even have written code that is in core Emacs my modus themes package as well as several other smaller patch patches. You benefit from all the Emacs extensions. The Emacs community has developed a rich corpus of extensions. You do not need to invent anything right away in order to be productive. We call these extensions packages as they are distributed in a way that makes them easy to install and then use directly. The Emacs program you will download on your computer ships with plenty of packages builtin. Depending on your needs, you may not even have to install anything from what the community has to offer. Though, if you want a package, it is fairly easy to get it to run on your system. Emacs is not picky about how you should use it. You are empowered to be opinionated and that is part of the Emacs way. Some powerful extensions are built in. For example, Emacs ships with a package called org mode. At its core, this is a markup language. I am using it right now in this document. Notice how lines that start with an asterisk function as headings. Such a heading is at the top of the screen right now. This is what the markup does. You just type some characters and they have special meaning in the given context. Org lets you write documents including books, handle your tasks, organize your agenda and much more. It is a powerhouse. There are so many things to discover in Emacs in general as well as in the broader package ecosystem. Emacs as a whole, so core Emacs as well as all the packages provide high quality documentation that explains everything of what you can use. Which brings me to the documentation culture of Emacs. When you install Emacs, you get with it plenty of technical manuals. There is also an interactive tutorial to help you make sense of the basics. Furthermore, when you ask Emacs for help about the definition of a function or the value of a variable, you receive the documentation for the thing you are looking for. I demonstrated that earlier. There was this help uh buffer that was telling me what this function does. and that documentation string was written in the um appropriate format in the EMAC list source code. The expectation for all contributions to the official Emacs program is that the code is well documented and the manual is updated accordingly when necessary. Of course, most packages have high quality manuals. Core Emacs sets the standard of what good documentation looks like. Package developers follow this practice. For example, my denote package has a manual that is over 7,500 lines long. It exceeds 52,000 words. In it, users find detailed instructions as well as code snippets that they can copy and use outright. And this is not the exception. All my packages are like that to the extent necessary. Most other developers do the same. As a community, we have access to so much knowledge for free and in freedom. If we are committed enough, we can learn from others and thus become better ourselves. We do so in a spirit of sharing, in a spirit of caring. For me specifically, all this was of great help. I am self-taught because I received all those great resources from the community. I thus consider it my duty to give back in kind. Emacs has a steep learning curve. Because Emacs is extensible, there is practically no limit to what you can do with it. At least this is a case for all tasks that are textheavy. Emacs will just gracefully evolve to match your requirements provided you can extend it on your own or with a relevant package. The downside, however, is that it is not easy to become proficient in it. If you are committed, you can learn the basics within the first few days. Though you will need to invest a few weeks or months to become skillful. It depends on how much effort you put into it, what sort of work you are doing, and what your background is. I learned the basics within a few days. I started wring writing my own Emacs list within weeks and within a year I had my modus themes moved into core Emacs. Do not skip the manuals. Several starter kits are available to help you get started. They set things up so you don't need to discover everything at the outset. The new version of Emacs, which is Emacs version 31, currently in development, will even come with a newcomer theme, which configures several settings in advance. These can make the learning curve a bit smoother. For me, anything that improves the onboarding experience is a plus. Though, I do not think that Emacs will ever become plug and play. This is due to its sheer depth and extensibility. It does so much that you still need to invest the time and effort into learning it. However you start, the most reliable study involves the manuals. Those are written for the benefit of the user. Read them carefully. Adjust your expectations. What I can say with confidence is that Emacs is not for tourists. You cannot switch to it with the expectation that you will have a good time right away. No, that will not work. There simply is no shortcut to excellence. I encourage you to take it one step at a time. Emacs will make you more productive provided you are patient enough to unlock its virtually boundless potential. Take it slow and be methodical. Rely on the official manual no matter your starting point. Read from it and gradually incorporate its insights into your workflow. The community, myself included, has plenty of resources to complement that study. Blog posts, video tutorials, books, but do not skip the official manual. Learning it slowly means that you will become proficient faster than you would otherwise uh would. Why it is worth learning how to use Emacs? I already talked about the technical side of things with regard to the integrated computing environment. Now combine that with two facts. Number one, Emacs is free software. This means that we as a community are its custodians. Number two, GNU Emacs has been around since the 1980s. It will stay relevant for decades to come. Emacs is not old. It is timeless. This is because it can be extended in a spirit of freedom. Whatever new technology or idea we have as a collective, we can eventually bring into Emacs. This way our integrated computing environment adapts with the times. Thus, Emacs remains ever relevant. The initial effort pays off long term. Couched in those terms, the initial effort you will put into learning Emacs is actually not that much. You have to maintain a longer term view of this project. If you are patient, Emacs will be one of the most reliable tools you will ever use throughout your life. And I say this as a handyman myself, as someone who uses many tools for manual labor, having built the house I am in among others. I switched to Emacs in the summer of 2019. It is almost 7 years already. I see no reason not to use Emacs for the next seven years. If I can, I will still want to write articles, do programming, maintain my agenda, and probably make presentations like this one. Presentations, which by the way include those typos, I will leave them in. So, I wrote this in one go and it was fun. In conclusion, folks, remember that you will not learn Emacs over the weekend. You are in it for the long term. Take it slow and you will enjoy the experience. This is all I have for you today, folks. Thank you very much for your attention. I wish you good luck in your Emacs journey and hope that you will have uh fun, make the most out of it. And uh just so you know, you can find this as well as everything else I publish on my website which is protilos.com. Protillos is my name of course. Thank you very much for your attention folks. Take care and goodbye now.

This is a holistic introduction to Emacs: how useful it is and how it champions free software. It is a modified version of the talk I did for the "FLOSS @ Oxford" event, organised by people at the University of Oxford. This is the page I wrote about that event: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-03-12-my-emacs-talk-floss-oxford/ And here is the transcript for this video: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-03-13-computing-in-freedom-with-gnu-emacs/